Now her husband never kissed her that she would not have given worlds to feel that his were the only lover’s lips which had ever touched hers; he never called her by one tender name that she did not shiver to think she had ever heard it from any other man.  There was coming into her that sense of awed self-appropriation, that fierce revulsion from any intrusion on the same, which comes into any woman’s nature when beginning to love as she is beloved.  Christian did not as yet; but she recognized her husband’s love, and it penetrated with a strong sweetness to her inmost soul.  Mingled with it was an acute pain, a profound regret, a sad humility.  Not hers, alas! the joyful pride, the full content, of a heart which is conscious in its sweetest depths that it gives as much as it receives.

This was all.  She had done nothing wrong, nothing unworthy of either herself or Dr. Grey; nothing but what hundreds of women do every day, and neither blame themselves nor are blamed by others.  She had but suffered a new footstep to enter her young life’s garden, without having had the courage to say of one little corner in it, “Do not tread there, it is a grave.”  Only a grave; a very harmless grave now, tricked with innocent, girlish flowers, but still containing the merest handful of dust.  It would never corrupt, and might even serve to fertilize that simple heart, which, out of its very simplicity, had made for itself a passing idol out of what was essentially fake and base, which would have shortly crumbled to pieces out of its own baseness, had not Fate—­or Providence—­with kindly cruel hand forever thrown it down.  Still, this was a grave, and her husband did not know it was there.

Nobody ever had known.  The day of delusion had been so short, and the only relics left of it were those four letters, burnt by herself on her marriage morning.  The whole story, occupying in all only four weeks, had gone by exactly like a dream, and she had awakened—­awakened to find out what love really was, or what it might have been.

She wept, not loudly, but quietly, till she dared not weep any more.  A sudden thought made her struggle at once for composure, and try to efface every external trace of tears.

“I am Dr. Grey’s wife,” she said to herself and resolved that the grand University magnates should find out nothing in her unworthy of that name—­nothing that could make people say, even the most ill-natured of them—­and, alas! she had lately come to learn that the world is filled, not, as she thought, with only bad and good, but with an intermediate race, which is merely ill-natured—­say, with a sneer, that Dr. Grey’s second marriage had been “a mistake.”

Never before had Christian thought much of these outside things; but she did now—­at least she tried her best.  There was not a lock unsmoothed in her fair hair, not a fold awry in her silks or laces, and not a trace of agitation visible in her manner or countenance when Mrs. Grey opened her door to descend the stairs.